ahittle said:
I remember Edge saying somewhere that he was crap at improvising. He seems like too meticulous a person to just wail and see what comes out. And judging from some of the Salome outtakes, the man can hit some serious clams when he's mucking about.
I like the Broadway comment.
Actually I think Edge (whom I admire far more than, say, improv guitarists like Mike McCready or Eric Clapton)
is crap at improvising - in the conventional sense. If you listen to his performance with Wyclef in Dublin in '02, for instance, what Wyclef describes beforehand as "some improvisation" - and which may have been rehearsed, for all I know - is nothing at all interesting. Lovely, yes; but nothing of even slight musical interest.
Although I do wish U2 were a bit more spontaneous at times, it's important to keep in mind
why they do what they do. Edge perfects every guitar part in every song. Bono pointed this out at the Brisbane concert - he said, after the NYD solo, which has been played exactly the same way for 24 years, "Edge says he can't improve on that solo, that it's perfect. What do you think?" As exhilarating as it is to hear, say, McCready do something new on Alive every night, I always reflect on the fact that McCready's one-off solos are artistically inferior to Edge's by-rote solos, in terms of their exact perfection of expression. PJ also play a fair number of songs the same way every night, and they do that because in those cases, the original version is too perfect to be messed with.
Also, remember that what many rock groups think of as "improvisation" is not really improvisation at all, but subtle variations on the same themes. Even now, fifteen years after Pearl Jam's debut album was recorded, you could make a chart showing the fundamental similarities between the studio solos in Alive or Evenflow and the newest live solos. The same fundamental principle is true of Zeppelin, the Dead - any great jam band. Only jazz guitarists truly improvise. This is not a criticism of rock bands, just an attempt to put their technique in perspective.
PJ rocks my world and moves my soul. But I prefer U2, and I see improv, in rock and roll, as only a small part of what makes a band great.
